given the late posting of this, shall we say that people read as much as possible of it, but are only really expected to have read the enemy within? just a thought…

The Enemy Within

-La Ventana Collective

The student is a state of being. It is a transitory state. It is a hazing; it is a rehearsal. It is a preparatory stage.

The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because s/he does not recognize her/his own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. The student is not only deadened to reality, s/he is also deprived of the consciousness of her/his own suffering. The student accepts this as “normal,” but it is only the normality of her/his repression that makes the student like the rest of society.

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for some privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship.

It is in the University where submissiveness is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.

The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.

The University is, in fact, a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is.

The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; most professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—both material and emotional—is more extreme than that of the proletariat’s. However, this poverty is temporary and not comparable with the miserable existence of society’s poor. Because student poverty is only temporary, and because being a student is too temporary and detached from the historical process, the student accepts the poverty without resignation. The student wallows in it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate. However, the student will only discover an endless, inevitable mediocrity.
The student movement is blind to itself because it is detached from the rest of society; it does not understand the forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its struggle to its own life. (The issue is not about incompetent state and school administrators and the severe budget cuts. Recovering funds will not solve the University’s perpetual problems.) The student movement seeks ‘demands’ everywhere, but because students cannot see the absurdity of their own lives and their own imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the struggle is for.

The deaths of students who struggle all over the world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student movement and the superficiality of its own struggles.

When the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the student is trapped. (It knows its objectives. Its tactics are clear. It moves with confidence.)

We begin by killing the enemy within us and within our friends with whom we share our classrooms, homes, and beds. We come together in small bands with those we have learned to trust, occupying everything that represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.

The function of the student movement must be something other than making demands of the University, but to destroy the existence of the student as a distinct social role and character structure. More eager for grades than knowledge, more eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the first enemy of the student is within you.

The student however should not alone be singled out for student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs where each sector of social life hSan Francisco State

as been subdued by a similar imperialism.

Communiqué from an Absent Future

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay. Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

TUC Santa Cruz

hough we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile, however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content. While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage. Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died. Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations. Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police. Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange. Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

WUC Santa Cruz

e intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over. Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by cancelling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

We’ll see you at the barricades.

Research and Destroy

2San Francisco State

009

Destroy the University

-André Gorz, 1970

The university cannot function, and we must thus prevent it from functioning so that this impossibility is made manifest. No reform of any kind can render this institution viable. We must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory. The crisis of the institution of the university goes beyond (as we will show) the realm of the university and involves the social and technical division of labor as a whole. And so, this crisis must come to a head.

The occasions and the ways of making it come to a head are subject to discussion. They are more or less good. But the discussion and the critique can only be carried out in a worthwhile fashion by those who recognize that the rejection of reformism is necessary, and its stakes global.

The open crisis in the university in France goes back to the beginning of the 1960’s, to the Fouchet Plan. When the majority of an age group strives to present itself for the baccalaureate and the majority of those with diplomas strive to enter the university, the mechanisms of social selection put in place by the bourgeoisie take a beating, its ideology and its institutions thrown into crisis.

The ideology of the academy is that of the equality of chances for social promotion though studies. This equality – and Bourdieu and Passeron have demonstrated this – has always been fictitious. Nevertheless, the mechanisms and criteria of academic selection in the past were sufficiently “objective” for their class and arbitrary character to be masked; one was eliminated or chosen in function of a group of “aptitudes” and “competences” that were defined once and for all. Traditionally the left fought, not against class criteria of selection – which would have forced it to fight against selection itself and against the academic system as a whole – but for the right of everyone to enter the selection machine.

The contradictory character of this demand remained masked as long as the right was, in theory, recognized for all while, the practical possibility to use it was denied to the vast majority. From the moment when, with the assistance of the diffusion of knowledge, the majority strives to obtain the practical possibility to use a theoretical right, the contradiction is made clear; if the majority accedes to higher education the latter lose their selective character. The right to study and the right to social promotion can no longer go together; if, at best, everyone can in fact study, everyone cannot be promoted to privileged posts. The mechanisms of academic selection having been beaten down, society will either seek to put complementary mechanisms in place, or to restrict the right to study through administrative limitations.

These administrative limitations – numerous clausus, exams for university entry – are such delicate matters politically that the successive governments of the Fifth Republic have retreated before their application. In fact, the limitation ex ante of the number of students is the frank and brutal negation of a juridical principle and a social fiction, i.e., that the chance of social promotion through studies is equal for all and that the possibility to study is only limited by the aptitude for doing this.

Destroying this juridical fiction means exposing the illusory character of bourgeois freedoms, and above all means confronting, in the name of a technocratic rationality – study is expensive and it isn’t profitable when graduates can’t be “promoted” – the middle classes or those so- called, whose support the capitalist regime can only preserve by dangling before them the possibility of “social elevation” limited by merit alone. Numerus clausus, pre-selection, and entry exams for universities, by destroying the illusions of the meritocratic ideology, will raise up against the capitalist state the middle classes and will reveal their condition to them as a social fate; they are composed, not of potential bourgeois, which the chance of birth and fortune prevented from become real bourgeois, but of a riffraff of the needy and of subaltern workers fated to serve, and not equal, the bourgeoisie.

Politically – and this is the meaning of the Faure reform – the bourgeoisie must thus maintain the fiction of the chance of social promotion offered to all via the free access to studies. However, it is reality that takes on the task of putting the lie to this fiction; the access to studies is free, but the studies lead nowhere. The number of graduates devalorizes the diplomas. There are many called and few chosen: there are few posts. The numerical reduction that academic selection wasn’t able to carry out will be carried out by a selection at the point of hire.

While waiting for the “force of circumstances” to be understood, i.e., that parents point their children towards “good” professional school, which are yet to be created, giving them access to “good’ jobs rather than towards universities which they’ll leave jobless, the state keeps the universities open, but little by little removes the value (e.g. Vincennes) of the diplomas they grant. In short, they give the university enough rope so that in the end – they hope – it will hang itself. In the meanwhile, they send cops into the universities in order that, in setting them ablaze, their discredit might be established.

These contradictions in the bourgeois university are related to fundamental contradictions:

The market value that has until now been recognized in diplomas rested on their rarity and on the rarity of aptitude for study. If the latter becomes general the bonus attached to the diploma must logically disappear and, with it, the hierarchical division of tasks.

If the aptitude for study – consecrated or not by a diploma – tends to become generalized, it ceases to be able to serve as a criterion for selection: social stratification can no longer claim to be based on competency and merit. The right to studies and the right to promotion can no longer march hand in hand.

If studies no longer assure promotion, it will result in either one thing or the other; either

they are considered a waste of time and a useless social charge, since they are profitable neither for those who do them nor for capitalist society; or

they are considered as a non-functional general education which society can, after all, afford the luxury of. But in this case the affirmation of the inalienable right to studies has as its corollary that these studies, which open onto no career, must present to those who enter them – and who later will become employees, workers, or whatever – an intrinsic interest.

It is at this point that the contradiction of the university becomes clear. Against the selection system, the student movement had affirmed the inalienable right to studies. The logic of this demand (which remained petite bourgeoise insofar as it was a defense of the possibility of promotion for all) had led it to anti-hierarchical and egalitarian positions: in order for everyone to have the right to study it was necessary that studies, ceasing to be a class privilege, should also cease to confer the right to an privilege whatsoever. It had to be accepted that those with higher degrees should work with their hands, which led to putting in question and refusing the social division of labor, the technical division of labor which bears its imprint, and every form of the hierarchization of tasks.

But it was impossible to stop there, for the moment we accept that studies don’t lead to a career, we must redefine the nature of studies, their content and their meaning; since they don’t confer a “useful culture” they must confer a “rebellious culture;” since they don’t correspond to a demand of society’s, they must respond to the demand of those who make it and who intend to destroy that society, abolish that division of labor.

But the university is by nature incapable of responding to this demand; it isn’t functional either in relation to the demands of capitalist economy or in relation to the demands of those who want to overthrow capitalism; it dispenses neither a “useful culture” nor a “rebellious culture” (which, by definition, is not dispensed); it dispenses a university culture, i.e., a knowledge separated from any productive or militant practice. In short, it is a place where one can pass one’s time in neither a useful nor an interesting fashion. No kind of reform can change this situation. It can thus not be a question of reforming the university, but rather of destroying it in order to destroy all at once the culture separated from the people it incarnates (that of the mandarins) and the social stratification of which it after all remains the instrument

Such are the facts that the university guerrilla brings to light: it shortens the agony of a moribund institution and reveals the hypocrisy of the corporations that defend it. Can it be said that the leftist students will not be able to either put something else in its place or change society so that that other thing becomes viable? It is obvious: students cannot, on their own, either produce another culture or make the revolution. What they can do, however, is prevent the heightened crisis of bourgeois institutions, of the division of labor and the selection of “elites” from being masked. This is what they are doing (and is what all the partisans of order – of this order or of another, every bit as authoritarian and hierarchical – reproach them for). Alone they cannot go any farther; the effective destruction and even the contesting (and not only ideological) of the division of labor cannot be carried out in the universities; it can only be carried out in the factories and enterprises; it supposes the critical analysis of a productive organization whose apparent technical rationality is at one and the same time the objectification and mask of a political rationality, of a technique of domination. It supposes a practical knowledge of the process of production and the practical enterprise in order to change it; in order to submit it to the “associated producers,” to replace the hierarchical division by the voluntary division of labor.

It is only from the starting point of this effective critique of the division of labor that, in its turn, the critique can become effective of the education which, directly (in technical and professional schools) or indirectly, forms the managers, the enforcers, and the losers of capitalist production. The destruction of the university and class education is thus not only the affair of the taught alone; it is above all the affair of the working class if the capitalist division of labor, of which the school is the matrix, is to be surpassed.

The crisis of the bourgeois university and the working class revolt against the despotism of the factory confer an immediate relevance on the question of this surpassing. And if the conjunction between these two aspects of the same crisis – that of the division of labor – doesn’t arrive at the effective joining of the students and workers and a reciprocal critique of the methods of education and domination, the fault doesn’t lie with the student movement; it lies with the traditional organizations of the working class movement, who are doing everything possible to lock the students in the university ghetto in order to better control the workers’ demands. If the necessary violence of the student struggle thus tends to wear itself out in symbolic insurrections on the university level alone, it is not due to a perverse taste for objectless violence; it is because violence alone is capable of smashing, if only temporarily, the encirclement of the university ghetto and of posing a problem whose existence the reformists of all stripes prefer to ignore. This problem – that of the crisis of bourgeois institutions and ideology and the division of labor – is a political problem par excellence. It isn’t enough that the political parties refuse any political meaning or expression to student violence for it to be simple vandalism; it is a matter of a violence both political and politically necessary, if not sufficient.

Source: Les Temps Modernes #285, April 1970

Communiqué from the UCLA Occupation

-Participants in the Carter-Huggins Hall Occupation

OUC Los Angeles

n 19 November at approximately 12:30 students occupied Campbell Hall at UCLA. The time has come for us to make a statement and issue our demands. In response to this injunction we say: we will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, we will occupy. We have to learn not to tip toe through a space which ought by right to belong to everyone.

We are under no illusions. The UC Regents will vote the budget cuts and raise student fees. The profoundly undemocratic nature of their decision making process, and their indifference to the plight of those who struggle to afford an education or keep their jobs, can come as no surprise.

We know the crisis is systemic – and that it reaches beyond the Regents, beyond the criminal budget cuts in Sacramento, beyond the economic crisis, to the very foundations of our society. But we also know that the enormity of the problem is just as often an excuse for doing nothing.

We choose to fight back, to resist, where we find ourselves, the place where we live and work, our university.

We therefore ask that those who share in our struggle lend us not only their sympathy but their active support. For those students who work two or three jobs while going to school, to those parents for whom the violation of the UC charter means the prospect of affordable education remains out of reach, to laid off teachers, lecturers, to students turned away, to workers who’ve seen the value of their diplomas evaporate in an economy that ‘grows’ without producing jobs – to all these people and more besides, we say that our struggle is your struggle, that an alternative is possible if you have the courage to seize it.

WUC Los Angeles

e are determined that the struggle should spread. That is the condition in which the realization of our demands becomes possible.

To our peaceful demonstration, to our occupation of our own university, we know the University will respond with the full force of the police at its command. We hear the helicopters circle above us. We intend to learn and to teach through our occupation, humbly but with determination. We are not afraid. We are not going anywhere.

Playing Custer: Adventurism in the Occupation Movement

–Take Back UCI

One thing that is more amazing than the expansion of the strategy of occupation from school to school is the remarkable similarity in the rhetoric of our opposition across terrains.

And I don’t mean Capital or university administrations, I’m talking about our most fervent opponents within our own ranks: particularly among the “build the movement first” leftists.

Rather than enter the discourse over the effectiveness of the “demand and march” model of campus activism or movement building as preceding any action, these opportunists and proceduralists have resorted to calling students who take the initiative to liberate buildings and spaces “adventurists.” This same term has been repeated to such a degree between New School and UC-Santa Cruz that it appears that our detractors maintain networks parallel to our own.

[Somewhat ironically, these factions of the “left” have repeatedly sought to co-opt student initiative, breaking and entering into spaces and situations of adventure merely to augment their dwindling memberships while marginalizing our rage. But in so doing, they are presenting a dead end avenue for venting. In fact, these self-proclaimed “revolutionary” organizations are nothing but the parasitic pygopagus conjoined twin of Capital and the State and will die upon the liquidation of both–attaching themselves to any sites of revolutionary adventure like leeches and sucking them dry. In this regard, they are no different than our student governments.]

But while they use the term pejoratively, we actually see it as a compliment. Perhaps the fact that they see adventure so distastefully sheds some light on the impotence of the contemporary Left, that they are so willing to self-castrate the only appendage that has historically been effective in staving off Capital.

But adventure is what is ultimately appealing to the disaffected masses, and what is necessary. The ability to find some excitement, to find a rupture in the daily anesthetized routine of life, is at the root of sports riots, affairs, shoplifting, and amusement parks. Television even fulfills this need when there is a lack of access to rupture or genuine adventure.

This also explains why no one comes to our meetings and rallies. We are tired of work and school, why would we choose to emulate those prisons elsewhere? Why must our “organizing” projects such model replicas of the greater mundanity of alienated life?

Adventure is self-defense, self-learning, mutual experience. We find ourselves and each other in adventure, in life-altering occurrences which tear apart the fabric of the status quo and give us a blank canvas upon which to paint our future.

WUC Santa Cruz

e can never liberate others for them. We can never impart all of our correct consciousness upon workers, nor can we with words alone convert students to our particular brand of Marxism or Anarchism. What we can do is generalize conflict, and create situations of adventure. Remember how we ourselves came into our own individual politics: most likely through a series of life-changing experiences, through situations of adventure. With this in mind, if we are truly interested in “building the movement,” we have to understand that we can only draw our peers into the politics of liberation through the spaces of liberation and the politics of adventure as well. “Movement” implies a continuation of action; any real movement must move to grow.

Whether we are already cognizant of its existence or not, there is a global subterranean civil war. We are all unwitting participants; our choice is not whether to fight or even who to fight, but how and where to fight. It is up to us to open new fronts, discover new weapons. Others will join the struggle as they pass through these fronts. This war cannot be won with words, guns, or members. Victory in this war depends on the generalization and expansion of adventurism, via the tactics of temporary occupation, expropriation, sabotage, and guerrilla action. If we refuse to fight, we die. If we become content with our victories and refuse to expand and generalize, we die. Only in a constant state of adventure can we experience individual and collective liberation, which inevitably recedes the moment we capitulate to authority or return to the dull, lifeless drawl of the endless meeting.

RUC Irvine

ather than condemn adventurism, we must come to recognize the necessity of creating spaces and situations of adventurism and developing a politics of adventurism. Until then, those of us already engaged in clandestine and adventuristic action will continue to do so, as we watch the rest of the “movement” atrophy.

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

-Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

“If you’re scared today you’ll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you’ve got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren’t slaves we have to do it so we can do what they’re doing in all other schools to show that we’re the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can’t wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity. The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged; cascades of hidden meaning rush onto rigid notions of possession and our eyes look past surface appearances. So now when asked, “who does the university belong to?” we can’t fail to recognize that the college itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin. Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and the Regents but to also extend belonging past national and state borders and throughout time. It’s clear, the entire university, for that matter, every university belongs to everyone, employed and unemployed, all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours because it’s everyone’s and the destruction of the property relation, with all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the affirmation of this truth. It’s our university…

…but, as of now, in its present configuration, who would want something so disgusting as a school?

The Poverty of Student Life is the Poverty of Capitalist Society

It’s now larger than any conspiratorial plot by Thomas Huxley. In fact, he could have never envisioned the extent to which contemporary class society would transform education as such into another separated activity, detached from the totality of life and devoid of any practical worth or good, while, simultaneously, being in perfect accord with the needs of capitalist production.

Learning is now sapped of all its content, education is but another part of the assembly line in the social factory, and the university itself serves an important function within the reproduction of disjointed life in this divided society. While the collegiate apparatus infests countless minds with the logic and technical knowledge of capital, the illusion is being sold that somehow academic labor is divorced from the world of work. Our apologies, but a term paper is not the production of autonomous and creative knowledge, it is work and therefore exploitation. It is human activity animated for the sake of capital not for humanity itself. The conditioning and preparation of students for a life crushed by regimented value creation is the essential purpose of the college: to teach the young how to give and take orders. Nothing about the university is neutral; its role in society is clear. The lines are being drawn.

The Representation of the Student Body Has Become an Enemy of the Student Body

You will always be offered dialogue as if that were its own end; it will die in bureaucracy’s stale air, as if trapped in a soundless room. In insurrectionary times, action is the speech that can be heard.
-Slogan written on a Digital Wall

Far before last week’s events, we’ve located them in the enemy’s camp. Student activist-leaders shamed, begged, pleaded, and finally began to shriek and scream at us when we ignored their megaphone-amplified orders. In their last ditch effort to see their commands followed, they physically assisted the police in blocking us from occupying buildings and protected the outnumbered cops from our punches and shoves. It’s obvious they’ve chosen their side some time ago. These are the idiots who were telling people who tried to break down the door of California Hall on November 18th that they should not do so because “there was no consensus.” These are the same fools who sabotaged the attempted storming of the Regents meeting at UCLA and the occupation of Covel Hall, ruining months of self-directed planning, after declaring the crowd had become too “agitated.” The Cynthias, who later that day went on to disrupt the occupation of Carter-Huggins Hall. These are the same politicians, who grabbed the megaphone as students marched in to the President’s office in Downtown Oakland, prepared to raise utter hell and instead directed them into a dialogue with middle-level administrators, later issuing an order that the crowd must leave “peacefully.” Disgusting, yet typical. The only consensus they want is rallied around the social peace and the preservation of the existent institutions and the only alteration they want of the power structure is their ascent to the top of it. By actively collaborating with the administration and police, by orchestrating arrests, by frittering away the momentum of the angry, they validate the insults we flung at them and they revealed themselves for the “student cops,” “class traitors” and “snitches” they are.

For them it’s a knee-jerk reaction: challenge their power and they fall back on identity politics. If they don’t get their way they cry privilege. When the actions escalate, when we begin to feel our power, the self-appointed are waiting to remind us that there may be the undocumented present – the activist super-ego. Somehow in their tiny paternalistic brains they believe they know what’s best for immigrants implying that the undocumented are too stupid to understand the consequences of their actions and god granted the student leaders the wisdom to guide these lost souls. In their foolish heads, immigrants remain passive sheep, black people never confront the police and just enjoy the beatings they get, and the working class always takes orders from the boss.

In pseudo-progressive tongue they speak a state-like discourse of diversity; the groans of the student-activist zombie is the grammar of the dead revolutions of the past. Their vision of race politics ignores the triumphs and wallows in the failures of the 60’s movements. The stagnant ghosts of yesterday’s deadlocked struggle; they are the hated consequences of the civil rights era that produced a rainbow of tyranny with a Black president mutilating Afghanis, Asian cops brutalizing students on campus, and Latino prison guards chaining prisoners. In this same way, the opportunists act out their complicity with the structures of order. When students defy preset racial categories and unify in order to take action on their own behalf, the student cops attempt to reinforce the present day’s violent separations and reestablish governance. They fail to recognize that divisions among proletarians are questioned only within the struggle itself and the festering scissions between the exploited can only be sutured with hands steadied by combat with the exploiters. Like a scalpel used to reopen stitched wounds, the student activists’ brand of multi-culturalism is undoubtedly a tool of state repression.

During the scuffle with the police in front of California Hall on the inaugural day of the strike, one of the student cops asked, “What’s going to happen when we get into the building?” For us, given the social context of the strike, the answer is obvious, for them, even the question is problematic because of the risk it poses to their position of dominance. In the moment of rupture, their role as managers becomes void. Self-directed action crowds out the programmatic. They forever need to stand on the edge of the reality that something could pop off, because it is in that possibility that they can control the situation and ensure that things do, in fact, move in their way towards nowhere. When things get hot, the self-elected of the student movement are waiting with their trusty fire extinguishers ready in hand because they know that when people act on their own and valorize their self-interest, their authority crumbles and everyone can see how bankrupt their strategy of social containment actually is. The student activist stutter-steps on the path of nothingness. But we hope to turn the mob against them. To seize their megaphones and declare: “Death to Bureaucracy!” Some may ask, “Why have these hooligans come to our campus?” “They’ve come to ruin everything!” the student leaders will say.

And for once, we agree.

We Are Not Students, We Are Dynamite!

ASan Francisco State

movement results from combinations that even its own participants cannot control. And that its enemies cannot calculate. It evolves in ways that cannot be predicted, and even those who foresee it are taken by surprise.
-Paco Ignacio Taibo

Many will ask then, why have we thrown ourselves into the ‘student movement?’ We are not students, at least not now and never in the UC system. It is not feasible for us to attend the UC in the first place, either because of the cost or the lack of desire to live the rest of our lives ridden with overwhelming debt.

We have not come to the university to make demands of the Board of Regents or the university administration. Nor do we wish to participate in some form of ‘democracy’ where the ‘student movement’ decides (or is told to do so by student leaders) how to negotiate with the power structure. For us, Sacramento and its budget referendums are as useless as the empty words spewing from the mouths of the union leaders and activists on campus. Nothing about the “democratizing” the school system or forcing it to become better managed or more “transparent” even mildly entices us. No, we didn’t join the student movement to obtain any of these paltry demands.

Last week, we began to attack the university not just because we are proletarians scorned by and excluded from the UC, or that we hope by resisting we may reduce costs and thus join the UC system and elevate our class positions. Our choice to collaborate in the assault on California’s school was driven solely by our own selfish class interest: to take its shit and use it for ourselves. Occupied buildings become spaces from which to further strike the exploiters of this world and, at the same time, disrupt and suppress the ability of the college to function.

Like any other institution structured by class society, the university is one of our targets. We made our presence in the student movement to break down the divisions between students angry over fee hikes, workers striking against lay offs, and faculty at odds with the administration over cuts and furloughs. These are not separate struggles over different issues, but sections of a class that have a clear and unified enemy. We have come for the same reason we intervene in any tension: to push for the total destruction of capitalist exploitation and for the re-composition of the proletariat towards communism.

And so, ask yourself how could one even go about reforming something as debilitating as a university? Demanding its democratization would only mean a reconfiguration of horror. To ask for transparency is nothing but a request for a front row seat to watch an atrocity exhibition. Even the seemingly reasonable appeal for reducing the cost of tuition will leave the noose of debt wrapped snuggly around our necks. There’s nothing the university can give anyone, but last week’s accomplishments show that there is everything for us to take. If anything, our actions, as a means in themselves, were more important than any of the crumbs the UC system or the Regents Board might wipe off the table for us. During these days, we felt the need for obliterating renewal give rise to intense enthusiasm. We felt the spirit irradiate throughout campus and press everyone “to push the university struggle [not only] to its limits,” but to its ultimate conclusion: against the university itself.

…And So It Must Spread

“It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form.”

-The Phenomenology of Spirit

The stench that the university emits has become unbearable and students everywhere are reacting against the institution that has perpetually rotted away their being via an arsenal of disciplinary techniques. At campuses across California the corrosion of life is brought to a quick halt when the college’s daily mechanism of power is given the Luddite treatment, and suddenly, studying becomes quite meaningless. Shamefully, the administration, terrified they are losing control and supervision of the pupils they spent so much time training, turn riot police on anyone ripping off their chains. At UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, SF State and CSU Fresno the unlimited occupations display the universal need for free and liberated space. The recalcitrance is spreading. In Austria, students left their occupied territory at the Fine Arts Academy to march on the US embassy in solidarity with the police repression on California campuses. On the same continent, the occupations in Greece have now extended outside the universities into the high schools and even the middle schools. Everywhere, the youth are recognizing the school as a vapid dungeon stunting their growth and, at the same time, they are refusing submission to the crushing of their bodily order. All over, a new generation is seeking the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.

The assaults on police officers, the confrontations with the administration, the refusal of lectures, and the squatted buildings point the objective struggle in the direction of the complete and total negation of the university. That is, brick by brick smashing the academic monolith into pieces and abolishing the college as a specialized institution restricted to a specific segment of society. This will require the instillation of technique known as learning to be wholly subverted and recomposing education as a generalized and practical activity of the entire population; an undermining through which the student shall auto-destruct.

Going halfway always spells defeat, and so, the spreading of movement is our only assurance against this stagnation. Complete self-abolition necessitates that the logic of revolt spill out of the universities and flood the entire social terrain. But the weapons of normalcy are concealed everywhere and especially within the most mundane characteristics of daily life. The allegiance to the bourgeois family structure and interruptions by holiday vacations and school breaks threaten to douse the fuse before its ignition and hinder our momentum.

Let us not lose sight of the tasks before us.

We must forcefully eject the police from the campus. Find their holes and burn them out. Block their movements near occupied spaces. Build barricades; protect that which has been re-taken. We need only to look to Chile or Greece to see the immense advantage movements possess once they seize territory and declare it free of police. Blockade the entrances and gates of the campus as the students have already begun to experiment with at UC Santa Cruz.

We must also denounce and destroy the student Left (the recuperative, the parasitic, the “representative”) that seeks to de-escalate the movement and integrate it back into politics. Our venom is not only directed at those who assisted the police in blocking angry students from entering California Hall at UC Berkeley or obstructed the crowds during the Regents meeting at UCLA but also of those who sought to negotiate with the police “on behalf” of the occupiers of Wheeler Hall. It is telling that the police will negotiate with them, because to the cops, they are reasonable. We are not, however, because we seek the immediate annihilation of both the pigs and the activists.

Renew the strikes and extend their reach. Occupy the student stores and loot them. Sell off the computers in the lab to raise funds. Set up social spaces for students and non-students alike to come in and use freely. Appropriate the copy machines and make news of the revolt. Takeover the cafeterias and bars and begin preparing the communal feast. Burn the debt records and the construction plans. Chisel away the statues and vandalize the pictures of the old order. In short, create not an ‘alternative’ that can easily make its fit within the existent, but rather a commune in which power is built to destroy capitalist society. When faced with a university building, the choices are limited; either convert it to ashes or begin the immediate materialization of the international soviet.

To all waged and unwaged workers – students or not, unemployed, precarious or criminal we call on you to join this struggle. The universities can become not only our playgrounds but also the foundations from which we can build a partisan war machine fit for the battle to retrieve our stolen lives.

And to the majority of the students, from those paying their way to those swimming in debt, all used as collateral by the Regents, who bravely occupied buildings across California and fought the police against the barricades – we say this clearly: we are with you! We stood by you as you faced down the police in the storming rain and defended the occupiers. Your actions are an inspiration to us all and we hope to meet you again on the front lines. In you we see the spirit of insurgent students everywhere.

As our Austrian friends recently told us, “Take out your hairspray and your lighter”! Tear down the education factory. Attack the Left and everything that it “represents.” Attack the new bosses before they become the old ones. Life serves the risk taker – and we’re rolling the fucking dice!

FOR ANARCHY AND COMMUNISM!

-Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

Torchlit Evening with Birgeneau

It is no secret that the kids are pissed. Since September, we’ve carried out over a dozen building takeovers of varying scale and intensity on California campuses, and during the Days of Action against Cuts and Hikes in November, students in Berkeley and LA actually fought police. In the past few days, evictions of occupied spaces at SFSU and Berkeley by the armed agents of the state and academy can only represent the future of this form of education. Last night, we marched to war and for once didn’t wait for the enemy to strike the first blow.

EUC Berkeley

veryone can follow the thread connecting these events. The police action towards students in the past few months could be accurately called “extraordinarily frightening and violent” as Birgeneau whined of the ruckus that woke him last night. As a leading beacon of the capitalist media recently observed, “Whether you’re an oppressive foreign dictatorship or an American state in the process of committing fiscal suicide, you know you’re losing the public relations battle when encounters between armor-clad riot police with truncheons and college students are broadcast on TV.” Despite the liberal overtones, Newsweek exposes some important points. The dictatorship of capital is indeed performing an ensemble suicide, and as we are its captives, our will to live can only be expressed through revolt — refusal, negation, and the unleashing of unlimited human strikes. As students, we are supposed to be the embodiment of society producing its own future, but this society has no future; there will be no “return to normal” and we must find ways to inhabit this reality. From Berkeley to Greece and back around the other side, we are in civil war. This is the basis of modern life, and it is high time we illuminate this fact for any who remain confused.

It’s worth noting that last night, the activist-mediators and movement-bureaucrats who have behaved as volunteer deputies so many times in the past few months were nowhere to be seen. This was neither peaceful nor a protest; the time for dialogue is over. The path of reform and representation is our target as much as the sphere of academic production itself. Birgeneau was right, we are “criminals, not activists”: we are no longer kept obedient by the myth of peace as our normal condition. We must wonder as well about the people who cleared obstructions from the street in the wake of the march – streets used minutes later by police who attacked the mob and arrested 8 comrades on extreme and absurd charges. A reminder to everyone: solidarity means attack!

The rage that was loosed upon the chancellor’s disgusting palace was not only well-deserved, but a long time coming and should not by any means stop there. Not until every knowledge-factory grinds to a halt and every rich man’s house is either squatted or burned to the ground.

Note: This Communiqué emerged anonymously on the internet and La Ventana denies any responsibility in having produced it.

We are still here

-Occupy SFSU

To those disaffected and affected by the budget cuts. To those laid-off faculty who have been sent off this campus because Robert Corrigan values his six-figure income more than your pedagogy.
To those workers, always the unseen heroes who are the first to take the sacrifices. To those janitors, who were denied from doing their jobs because of us. We do this for you.

40 years ago on this campus, San Francisco State College gave in to the demands of the 5-month Ethnic Studies strike, which gained valuable educational and economic opportunities for all Black and Third-World people. Self-determination for people of color was the word of the day, and although concessions were made, the struggle for self-determination of the working-class has not ended, but is going through a new phase of global class struggle intensified by the polarization of capital and labor.

Also 40 years ago, Indians of All Nations took a famous federal property known as Alcatraz Island, or The Rock, and again occupied the land that Lakota Indians had taken years prior unsuccessfully. The organizers, American Indians from tribes all across the continent, included young Richard Oakes, a Mohawk SF State student. The occupation lasted 19 months, whereby the IAN demanded a new American Indian Center on the unused surplus property, created a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs to deal with the white man, and purchased the island with feathers and beads worth more than the money paid to the native inhabitants of Manhattan Island by colonialists.

We Are Still Here

The legacy of the militant student and working-class movements of the 1960’s lit the revolutionary consciousness of the globe, from the Latin-American workers’ struggles to the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa, and back home to the Black Panther Party in Oakland and the Third World Liberation Front. These movements challenged not only the dominant capitalist hegemony through class struggle, they spread new ideas of how to struggle.

Universities worldwide, like those in Austria, in Greece, Germany and our comrades across the bay at UC Berkeley have recently used the tactic of occupation as a means to challenge bourgeois property relations, where not production but knowledge and ideas are socially produced but privately appropriated for the ruling class, which categorizes and divides the working-class into hierarchal constructions that reproduce our high-level managers at the UC’s, our technical workers at the CSU’s, and the lower layers of the proletariat left to the crumbs of a community college education meaningless in this capitalist crisis; great training for the workplace, where the administration becomes the corporate board, the professor becomes the boss, and the tailist union bureaucrats become…well, I guess some things stay the same. The student is the worker, adding use-value to her education for future exploitation and extraction of surplus-value.

Although occupation, or reclaiming space, is not a historically new idea, it is a new form of struggle for many of those disillusioned with the promises of lobbying, those too tired of petitioning “our” elected leaders, those who have lost all faith in politics as they know it. As direct actions like these redefine socially-acceptable modes of protest, occupations themselves redefine the power-relations at the site of struggle. We are occupying because we understand that the budget cuts, which are manifestations of capital in its search for untouched investment and the prospect of profits, are enforced through our consent, through our submission, when we focus the gaze of rebellion at the self-imposed sites of bourgeois political debate and conflict like the Capitol Building in Sacramento, or even its local subsidiary office labeled Administration Building at every elementary school, at every junior high, every high school, every college and university.

Our power as working-class people does not reside in the uneven and rigged political game where winners are chosen by their capacity to pacify those who wish to change the system, by their capacity to coerce the oppressed into rolling the dice one more time for the sake of chance: the opportunity that this time, maybe this time, change can come peacefully for the benefit of those subject to endless waves of unemployment, for the benefit of those faced with the racism of the workplace, for the benefit of those attacked by sexism and homophobia on the streets. The reclaiming of space that is occurring as we write this statement is a challenge to the assumption that politics and the power of political control is only suited for white-male representatives in black suits. The real power exists here, at the site of exploitation, be it the school or the workplace. We plant the seeds of these institutions as workers, students, staff, and faculty, constantly maintaining and watering them, looking after them as a gardener takes after her garden, but we are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of that labor. This is the contradiction exposed.

By redefining and reclaiming these spaces, we expose the true violent nature of our society. After escalated police violence on the UC campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley, student occupiers rightly proclaimed that “behind every fee increase, a line of riot police.” In this structure, the Business Building of San Francisco State University, usually occupied by financial advisors for war-profiteering companies, there is no business as usual. Outside, the invisible hand of the market is holding a gun, revealing itself to us with a badge emblazoned “UPD”. The act of occupation is violent because it is a threat; we are not those who wield weapons, we are not those who possess the means to subordinate people to not just physical violence, but the psychological violence that disempowers us to believe that we do not have the power to resist and fight back. Then again, We Are Still Here

here is the poem, with two different intros (!) and at the end, what a friend had to say about it…

Publisher’s Preface

I received the Italian translation of Gherasim Luca’s The Inventor of Love upon which this English translation is based shortly after reading a rather mediocre, prosaic English translation of this poem/manifesto on the internet. Upon reading the Italian version, I discovered that this internet version also left out more than half of the original text. I won’t speculate about reasons, but it leaves out everything in the piece that could be offensive, everything that would be considered “politically incorrect”. This totally undermines the aim of the piece, eradicating its central point. Gherasim Luca was a member of the Rumanian surrealist group. One of the main projects of this group, to which his ideas and activity were central, was to attack and undermine the Oedipal conception of desire and sexuality that dominated in Europe at the time. This poem is an expression of that project. Such a project requires “the return of the repressed” – opening the gates to all the suppressed desire (in this case, specifically sexual) that churns within us. And, of course, repression deforms desire, and it can become quite monstrous. But continually hiding, denying or moralistically condemning it makes it still more monstrous so that we continue to be unable to master it (and I use the term master here quite consciously…). Of course, the specific forms of repression that Luca was confronting in Rumania in the 1940s were different than what we face now. We have gone through a liberalization (not at all a liberation) of sexuality (and other aspects of life) and a backlash against it since his time. One part of that backlash is political correctitude, which parallels the repressive practices of Luca’s time in certain ways, particularly in the attempt to control of language and tastes. This is why I think Luca’s piece remains relevant. Aside from being a convulsively beautiful poem, it offers an unflinching critique of these tendencies through its refusal to soften its language or hide the monstrous aspects of unleashed desire. I think we are in a time when the battle against puritanism in all of its forms is particularly important to any anarchist revolutionary project. Puritanism always demands some sort of authority, some sort of protector of the propriety it seeks to uphold. So an anarchist revolt is not just a revolt against the state, class and other hierarchies and capitalist society. It is also a revolt against every moral order. Thus, it must also be a pitiless frontal assault on political correctitude. In this project, we can plundering from Sade, Blake, Stirner, Nietzsche, Bataille, Luca, Anais Nin, Annie LeBrun, Rikki Ducornet and others who have dared to explore the varied reality of the repressed, often dark and monstrous, sides of desire in order to find tools, weapons and toys for really making our desires our own.

Introduction to the Italian Edition
Everything is unattainable in hateful class society, everything including love, respiration, the dream, the smile, the embrace, everything, except the incandescent reality of becoming. – Gherasim Luca
Salman Locker (who would later take the name of Gherasim Luca) was born in July 1913 in Dudesti-Vaccaresti, the Jewish quarter of Bucharest. Raised in a liberal family and in a country that was a crossroads for various civilizations, he came into contact with many cultures and languages in childhood. Besides Yiddish and Rumanian, he knew French and German, and it is likely that learning several languages so early influenced him in his repudiation of a static identity.
While still an adolescent, he began to collaborate with a few avant-garde magazines in the early 1930s, like Alge, Unu and Punctu. These were publications of frenzied prose, animated by the desire to subvert the academic sphere of literature following in the footsteps of Dada. Luca’s brief texts were accompanied by intentionally childish drawings that bear witness to the same love for scandal. In those years, Rumania was still recovering from the wounds inflicted by the First World War, but at the same time it was slipping under the talons of the Iron Guard, fascist legionnaires under Codreanu’s command.
While nationalist ideology caught on throughout the country, Luca decided to renounce his mother tongue and began to write in French. This was a gesture against all patriotic, religious and linguistic identity. In his eyes, the refusal of any writing subjugated to the authority of the vernacular language was the indispensable premise for struggling against the calcification of meaning, for freeing oneself from stereotypes. For him, as for an entire generation of young poets animated by internationalist utopia, this ideal of freedom and culture had a precise geographic location: Paris. Not the Paris describes in history books, the Paris of battles or Enlightenments, but the cosmopolitan city perpetually hovering between trance and ecstasy as well as the capital of revolution. Surrealism, with its effervescence, with its stubborn search for a way to reconcile dream and action, would seduce Luca and his friends Paul Paun, Gellu Naum, Delfi Trost, Perahim, Virgil Teodorescu. In those difficult years, they would give life to the Rumanian surrealist group that, in the words of Sarane Alexandrian “was the most exuberant, the most adventurous and also the most delirious group of international surrealism”.
Conflict with the nationalist regime was unavoidable. Luca directly attacked one of the historical spokespeople of the Iron Guard’s ultra-nationalism, Nicolae Iorga. He ended up in prison for his action. There he met a printing press worker who convinced him to collaborate with Free Speech, a newspaper edited by socialists and communists. When he was released, he went to Paris as the paper’s correspondent. In the French capital, he found old friends like Victor Brauner and Jacque Hérold, but refused to meet André Breton who he also valued and with whom he was in correspondence. The outbreak of the Second World War forced him to leave France. After traveling through Italy, Luca returned to Rumania in June 1940 along with Gella Naum. This was the same year as the pogrom in Iasi, and the Jewish community fell into a state of terror. Antonescu’s anti-Semitic politics and the constant threat of winding up in a concentration camp interrupted almost all public activity.
Only in 1947, with the proclamation of the Rumanian Democratic Republic was Luca able to make use of a print shop and open a gallery. The Rumanian surrealist group formed again and multiplied its activities, even though it was far from homogenous. Divided on many theoretical points, its members still participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition organized in 1947 at Maeght Gallery in Paris with the collective work Nocturnal Sands (a camera oscura populated by sixteen strange objects that on was supposed to travel through in search of new desires). Meanwhile in Rumania the air was becoming unbreathable again. After the fascists, it was now the task of the stalinists to repress freedom, instituting a harsh censorship. The Rumanian surrealist group was completely prohibited from publishing. Luca tried to escape in the company of Delfi Trost, but they were stopped at the border. The only hope for leaving the country was a visa for Israel, a document that would only arrive in 1952 thanks to the intervention of some French friends. After a few months traveling around Israel, Luca finally reached Paris where he could begin publishing again. These publications were rare and demanding works, authentic “book-objects” realized in collaboration with artists such as Jacque Hérold, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Piotr Kowalski. In fact, Luca – whose drawings and sculptures also come to mind – was no longer satisfied with printed paper; his poetry needed to go beyond the narrow confines of the page.
Following this path, in 1967, he began to read his texts publicly. His words shattered the silence of reading in this way, embodied in his voice. Some of the recitals that he gave throughout the world will never be forgotten due to the evocative force of his phonetic cabala, full of babbling and glossolalia, “in this physical relationship with words where sounds produce ideas”. Despite some false steps, like his visit to Cuba at the invitation of the Castro regime, Luca maintained a certain independence and fidelity to his form of solitary rebellion, refraining from accepting literary awards that were offered to him and refusing to respond to letters he received. Not even clamorous public recognition that was paid to him, from Gilles Deleuze who described him as “the greatest living French poet” to transalpine television that dedicated a program to him, seemed to touch him.
At the age of 81, putting what he had theorized many times into practice and following the example of several other surrealists, Gherasim Luca killed himself. His body was found in the Seine on March 10 1994.
In a letter dated February 9, the day of his disappearance, he made it very clear that he intended to abandon “this world in which poets have no place”.
The Inventor of Love originally appeared in Rumania in 1945, and it is one of the few works that Luca published in his mother tongue. It is one of the texts, written immediately after the war, in which the author affirmed the need to invent new desires and rouse them in all their explosive charge. One of these texts was the First Non-Oedipal Manifesto, now lost, in which Luca demanded the social disappearance of all family behaviors and their perversions. Another is the manifesto, Dialectic of the Dialectic, which he published in France with Delfi Trost. It was addressed explicitly to the international surrealist movement. In it the two authors lashed out against the neutralization of the movement’s subversive tension, denouncing the “artistic deviation” that “risks… making it acceptable to our class enemies”.
To ward of this recuperation by the culture industry, Luca and Trost (who became its psychoanalyst) relaunched the effort by once again posing the old surrealist project of uniting Sade’s contributions to those of Freud to subversive ends. They maintained “the destructive potential of love in the face of all established order” and looked upon “erotic magnetism as our most valuable insurrectional support” because only by freeing love “from its social and individual, psychological and theoretical, religious and sentimental constraints” can we reach the “the unlimited eroticization of the proletariat”, that is “the most precious token that can be found to ensure … a real revolutionary development”. This was only possible starting from a “non-oedipal position”, in other words refusing to be children of this world in love with their parents since “as long as the proletariat keeps the fundamental initial complexes we are fighting within itself, its struggle as well as its victory will be illusory, because the class enemy will remain, hidden in its blood, unknown to it. Oedipal limitations hold the proletariat in a position of symmetrical negation with the bourgeoisie, which manages in this way to instill its repulsive fundamental attitudes in it, in a manner all the more dangerous because it is unrecognized.” The two surrealists announced that they had “posed the problem of the complete liberation of man by also making this liberation depend on the destruction of our initial oedipal condition” precisely in Luca’s work that we are publishing here.
The Inventor of Love is a long monologue full of black humor, a vampiric hymn to the beloved woman. A woman absent in reality, that is not found in any of the feminine stereotypes that are offered to us, but that is invented through sacrilege, through destruction.
This is why in a world in which “everything must be reinvented” – since nothing belongs to us, being the product of the domination of the economy – it is necessary “to be ever more scornful, cruel, irreconcilable”.

The Inventor of Love
From one temple to the other
the black blood of my virtual suicide
flows

in vitriolic silence.

As though I had actually committed suicide

bullets criss-cross my brain
day and night

uprooting the ends of my optical,
acoustic, tactile nerve
– these limits –
and spreading throughout the cranium
an odor of detonated gun powder
clotted blood and chaos.

I carry this suicide’s head
on my shoulders
with a special elegance
and walk from place to place
with an infamous grin
poisoning
the breath of all beings and things
within a range of several kilometers

Seen from the outside
I seem to be someone falling
under machine gun fire

My uncertain stride recalls
that of the condemned man
of field mice
of wounded birds

Like a tightrope walker
hanging on to his umbrella

I cling
to my own imbalance

I know these unknown
routes by heart
I can wander them
with eyes closed

My movements
lack the axiomatic grace
of the fish in water

the vulture or the tiger

they seem haphazard
like something that one is seeing
for the first time

I am forced to invent
a way to move
to breath
to be

in a world that is neither water
nor earth, neither air, nor fire
how can one know ahead of time
whether to swim
or fly, walk or burn

This is why throughout the street
nothing, not even the shameful spectacle
of a priest or a statue
irritates me more than encountering
a child

I continue along my path
only because killing it would be a gesture
already done and far too vague

I prefer to remain among the people
as a potential danger
rather than as a murderer
as a provoker of slow agony

From this non-oedipal position
in the face of existence
I observe with baleful black eyes
hear with non-auditory ears
touch with insensible
artificial, invented hands
the thigh of this woman
whose perfume I don’t preserve
nor her bloom – the constant attractions
of her magnificent body – but rather the electric
spark, the shooting stars of her body
lit and spent only once
in the course of eternity
the fluid and the magnetism of that hip
its cosmic radiation, the inner
light and darkness, the surge of blood
that flows through it, its unique position
in space and time
that reveals itself to me under the monstrous
lens of my brain
of my heart and of my inhuman
breath

I am not able to understand
the fascination of life
beyond these unique revelations
in every moment

If the woman we love
isn’t invented before our eyes

if our eyes don’t abandon
the old stereotypes
of the image upon the retina

if they do not allow themselves to go beyond
to astonish, to draw us toward a region
never seen

then all life seems to me like an arbitrary fixation on a moment of our infancy
or of the infancy of humanity

a way of mimicking
someone else’s life

Indeed, life becomes a stage
where we interpret Romeo, Cain, Caesar
and other macabre characters

Inhabited by these corpses
like coffins we travel along
the path that links
birth to death

and it is not surprising
to see images
of life after death arising
from man’s abject mind

this repetition, this habit
this hateful exaltation of the familiar
and of counter-revolution.

I smell my beloved’s hair
and everything is reinvented

Smelling the hair of the beloved
with the subconscious and degrading idea
of then kissing her on the mouth
of passing from the preliminaries to possession from possession to a state of relaxation
and from this to a new state of arousal
summarizes the entire restrictive technique
of the congenital stereotype
that is human existence

If in carrying out this simple act:
smelling the hair of the beloved
one does not risk his very life
does not involve the destiny
of the last atom of his blood
and of the most distant star

if in the fragment of a second
in which we carry out anything
on the body of the beloved
our questions, our disquiet
our most contradictory aspirations
are not resolved in their totality

then love is truly
just what the pigs consider it
a digestive function
for the propagation of the species

For me the eyes of my beloved
are as somber and veiled
as any star
and one needs to measure
the radiation of her gaze
in light-years

It could be said that the relationship of causality between the tides
and the lunar phases
is not so strange
as this exchange of glances (of lightning)
where my destiny
and that of the whole universe
make a date
as if in a cosmic bathroom

When I reach out
for the breast of my beloved
I am not surprised
to see it immediately
covered with flowers

to see night suddenly fall
or to receive a letter sealed
in a thousand envelopes

In these unexplored regions
that the beloved continually
offers us

the beloved, the mirror, the curtain
the chair

With pleasure I darken
the eye that has already seen
the lips that have already kissed
the brain that has already thought
like matches sticks that serve only once

Everything must be reinvented

Before the body of the beloved
covered in scars
only an oedipal thought
has tried to enclose it
in a sado-masochistic formula
only a thought already thought
is content with
a statistician’s label

I find pleasure in certain knives
on which the manufacturer’s trademark
humorously revives
ancient medieval inscriptions

I find pleasure in allowing a knife to wander
over the body of the beloved
on certain overly hot afternoons
when I seem sweetest
harmless and tender

Her body suddenly flinches
as it always does
when she receives me between her lips
like in a tear

As if I were dragging
my hand in the water
while riding in a boat
her skin opens from every side of the knife
causing that dreamlike bloody stroll
to slide into her flesh
that I kiss on the mouth

From here I spot
the satisfied brain of the man
who denounces me to psychology
as a vampire

From here I notice on other afternoons
when my love is a flame
lost in its own darkness
pursued by its own restlessness
while by itself it launches mild and
bewildering snares, questions
and answers simultaneously
long corridors
stairs that go round and round endlessly
bricked up rooms where
I have committed suicide so many times
wild vegetation, a river
from here I see the simplifying
proud and cynical
convolutions
that discover a narcissist in me
and still a narcissist, still a fetishist
a coprophage or necrophile or somnambulist
or sadist, and still a sadist

With a secret and incomparable voluptuousness
that recalls the disguised existence
of the conspirator and the sorcerer
I allow myself to torture the beloved
to torment her flesh and to kill her
without being sadistic

I am sadistic precisely to the extent
to which one can say: he killed her
because he had a knife with him

I have a sadistic psychology with me
it may surprise me
while I violate a woman
but in this act
in which my entire being takes part
not all the possibilities
of my being take part

No single act can have the final word
but in any act
even in the most elementary
I risk my life

I love this peaceful summer evening
in which I watch the sky
from the window

While my eyes are attracted
by a single star
(I don’t know why I fix on it
with such fidelity)
my feverish, subtle, bewildering hands
the true hands of a murderer
peel an apple
as if they were flaying a woman

With my sex fully erect
a cold sweat all over my body
breathing more and more rapidly
I bite into the fruit
continuing to gaze from the window
at the distant star
with a demonic innocence

Without any reason
now I think of two sadists
of vegetation
William Tell and Newton
but if the law of gravity
can be deduced from Newton’s
legendary apple and the acceleration of motion
from Tell’s arrow
then maybe my love can be
described as sadistic
like every mythical
and legendary simplification

I love this invented beloved
this heavenly projection
of my hellish brain
with which I feed my demon

I project endlessly
onto her angelic flesh
convulsions, poisons
rage
but above all my great
my terrible passion for sacrilege

This unlimited passion for sacrilege
keeps all my boundless hatred
for absolutely everything that exists
at the temperature of negation
at the temperature
of the negation of negation
because everything that exists contains
in its subterranean possibilities
a tomb that we must profane
since we ourselves
at this moment
have the corpse-like tendency
to accept ourselves
to make axioms of ourselves

I love this woman who with her veins
so precious
prepares a warm blood bath
for me every afternoon

After this elementary bathing
of my demon
I no longer recognize anything
not even my own blood

*

If love is to lose
the paralyzing character
of the traumatic mother
and her threatening and castrating accomplice
the father

the beloved for whom my shaken
crystallized and devoured being yearns
from an unquenchable thirst for love
can only be a non-born woman

I am not talking about a woman
who is not yet born

one of those perfumed tumors
of the philosophical idealist
that every one of us conserves
in the bottom of his heart
like a nostalgic wound

this ideal, defined, distant woman
that the romantics have made
almost accessible to us
in their lyrical opium den
and that is sought in vain
in the four corners of the earth

this absolute woman is sought in vain
because her reason for being
is to never be encountered

Gradiva or Cinderella
once encountered
cease to be equal
to their perfume
becoming merely two model
wives and mothers

just as the least theoretical error
is a victory for death
this ideal woman who is yearned for
only with the desire of not finding her
or, once she is found, of losing her

with the desire of feeding
the religious and so deplorably
human idea
that love is the fount of sorrow
and vain illusion

this eternal woman of our dreams

that continues to dig out
the chasm between day and night
instead of filling it

making its duality
and the motionless agitation of man
at the bottom of his prison eternal

The coexistence of the banker with the poet
has ceased to be contradictory
and so the idea of deserting to the poet’s side
seemed that much more ambiguous to me

In this world where I am surrounded by
simultaneous, dominating, tyrannical
antinomies that I nourish

the most enlightened poet
seems like an excrescence
at least as purulent as
the greedy banker

the life of day and night
man’s dreaming and waking
irreconcilable
because they are already reconciled
in this perennial promiscuity
in which our endless little desires
our polite subversive ideas
our modest incestuous immoral dreams
our perennial immoral dreams
and the stupid and arrogant obstacles
of the external world
made ridiculously eternal

they quietly bring this smothered
and uselessly wasted life into agreement
with the mocking dream
that replaces it

the dream on which the oedipal man
is definitively based

that tremendous vicious circle
projected on all existence

The non-born woman
who alone has forced out
my boundless rage against man’s perennial
immobility in the great astral revolution

escapes that limiting
and smothering vicious circle
that insists upon the treacherous snare
of man’s maddened biology

a biology that still swings
between normal and abnormal
and whose dialectical solution
can change nothing
in the precariousness of existence

Precisely because I refuse
the precariousness of existence
in all its aspects
I view human liberation
as intimately linked
to the simultaneity of solutions

the leaps of man within
his destiny
will resolve at one time
all the demands of the moment

In this simultaneous correspondence
of our most varied
revolutionary aspirations

among which we necessarily include
the way of combing one’s hair, of kissing
of looking

(no one can persuade me
that after the first murder
the eyes of a woman
who walks down the street
look in the same way)

in the maniacal preoccupation not to leave
any desire waiting
to decide completely
in each moment

to be ever more scornful
cruel, irreconcilable

the guarantee that freedom once attained
will never again be taken away
from us is contained

Omitting the precariousness of man
his rudimentary, reactionary
funereal biology
in the vague and progressive hope
that it will be resolved the next day
knowing well that tomorrow
is slow to arrive
precisely because thanks to good sense
modesty and rationalism
we prohibit every tendency
to surpass ourselves and break through
our limits

And having dared to break through
those oppressing limits
that interfere with total
human liberation
at the moment when my apparent peers
lamentably commit suicide together
for abstract ideas
like beauty, justice and honor
I awaken alone
alone in the middle of a huge graveyard
without knowing whether
in touching these cold corpses
my hand brings them
a miraculous solution
or if it is limited to imitating
the lascivious quiver of the necrophile
but with the hope
with the irrational certainty
that in its decisive multiples
the most favorable of which
are of astral origins
my appearance in the world contains
the disintegration of this world
and that this solitary traveler
who carries a profanatory and furious
melancholy
into the peaceful paths of the graveyard
is a mere lover

A monstrous lover
in love with a monstrous unnatural
inhuman non-born lover
in love with this outsider
to the natal graveyard
from which we derive all the stereotypes of love
all the predetermined gestures whose refined
but modest diversity is not able
to feed the remote hope in the future
of this gloomy species
because the lone birth
makes its repetition, death necessary
because with the lone birth
man prepares his place in the graveyard
and the tomb stone
that he always carries
on his chest
limits the number of his movements

under the tomb stone
that we are accustomed
to carrying on our chests
as a necessity
man’s imprisoned lung suffocated
it repeats itself

this fatal paralytic will fatally love
a single woman in anyone
the woman that all love, the mother
as if he were locked up in a tower for life
with a woman, any one
he will love her fatally
fatally the arts and the ugly
human thing flower
fatally people get married
live together and carry out
a few hundred sensual
and emotional motions
that mark their limits
and even so-called
sexual psychopathology
that introduces a certain variety
into this rigidified world
even this cheery negation
that is sexual madness and vice
doesn’t seem sufficient to me
or rather it is only thanks to this
that I can still look man in the face
with a certain indulgence

these few hundred tics
that make humans resemble
each other like two drops of sweat
contain the germs of their decomposition
in the maternal image
in maternal causality
and little complications
contributed by the other sinister personage
that is the father
only make the landscape of this condemned species
even more monotonous
ruining it further

and I will never cease to ask myself
how one makes himself bear
this fate of galley slaves
and how it is possible
for the numbers of the desperate
of suicides and of murderers
to be so meager

In love with this beloved
only after having refused
the axiomatic condition of existence
accusing the authors of my days
in the same way that I killed the Creator

I take the liberty not to love
an image preformed by the Creator

and to follow the arrival of this beloved
in the world
in the same way that I might watch
in amazement
as a distant planet emerges from the chaos

to witness the attraction
and repulsion
that the different parts
of her always amazing body
bring to bear on one another

the dissociation
the crystallization
the simultaneous cooling
and combustion
of this adored nebula
that is my beloved
in perpetual becoming
in sublime negation
of her perpetually invented being

awakening me each morning
with a new image of love

since in this always invented beloved
all the living fragments
discovered under the biological ruins
of vanished humanity
arrange to meet

fragments of body
of aspirations
of love’s fossils

and not the entire body of woman
in which small virtues are locked up
together in a distressing promiscuity
renewed by small vices
hot and cold
troubles and exaltations
tears and joy

These women, these women’s bodies
that arrange to meet
in my beloved
abandon everything known
their preconceived ideas of love
the things they expected
to find in my room
behind them at the door
like useless rot
discovering (with bated breath
and with the wonder one feels
in seeing a charming, incomparable
stranger in the mirror
where one doesn’t see the time
to recognize oneself
in order to lose oneself again) the fluidity
of their blood in the depths of their being
buried under the dust
of so many centuries of waiting
under the thick, musty layer
of fatal, ancestral custom
of reaching for the maternal womb with nostalgia
when this womb would be accessible
in its daily, current
and total presence

These women’s bodies, these fragments
diamonds, mouths, eyelids
hair and veils
losing a part
of their defined individuality
renouncing the old
fatal formula
of the beloved
who is wanted as beloved
just as she is
even if those things that one loves in her
distance her from herself

in exchange they gain the freedom to escape
from the tragic limits of the initial complexes
that make them seek in me
the same gloomy personage
from the thousand masks
that is the father

These women’s bodies that I have dynamited
fragmented and mutilated
with my monstrous thirst
for a monstrous love
finally have the freedom to seek
and find beyond themselves
the marvelous at the depth of their being

and nothing will make me believe
that love can be anything other
than a fatal entry
into the marvelous
into its lascivious dangers
into its aphrodisiac, chaotic
underground
where the never encountered and the never seen
have the current character
of a continuous surprise

this entry to life and death
in the marvelous
is the key point
of existence for me
the ultimate point of departure from which life
begins to be worth the trouble of living

since this ultimate point of existence
contains in its secret warnings
the overcoming of the human condition
in all its oppressing aspects
the solution to the great oedipal drama
that mauls us, smothers us
that buries us alive
in our own tomb

The five women that come around
in the most unexpected
most singular and absurd
circumstances
my voluptuously amorous desperation
renders this tentacular and radiant
beloved malleable
as she impregnates my existence with her perfume

In certain hours of the day and night
while my peers
with a titanic effort
crawl toward the initial condition
which they are not able to reach

while on the terrestrial surface
the initial scene is mimed with
stereotyped, sublimated
or direct gestures
that are sensual, emotional
cultural, warlike or religious
its incendiary pleasure
has left a burn in the memory
that will never heal

while man pays the consequences
of his partial amnesia with his blood
in my dialectical reality the initial relationship
is reestablished by itself
the relationship of water with fire
of flesh with ectoplasm
of life with death
of love

In certain hours of the day and night
drawn by a phallic divinity
in whom love and magic
meet never again
to separate
unknown women appear in my life
unrecognizable in their own eyes
with a black velvet mask on their face

They carry out the ritual of love
with gestures that could recall
anything
even a death sentence
or a disappearance at the bottom of the sea
or the destruction of a precious papyrus
but in no case the elementary practice
through which man frees himself
with equal ease
in bordellos, in churches
or in his degrading passional dramas

Like mythical figures of love
of a kind that is invented before my eyes
these women carry out gestures
whose immediate or
hidden meaning escapes them
but whose demoniac resonance
fills them with voluptuousness

These women sign the pact
of blood with me

I draw their signature’s blood
out at random
from the dream, from the hip
from the finger, from the temple

Only after I have taken from them
the few drops of blood
with which they give themselves to me
as to a demon
only in the moment
when they no longer belong to themselves
do these women start to find themselves again
and to enchant and bewitch
through their inner murmuring

They unite their destiny
their shadow and their flesh
and by completing each other
one would say that they become
still more charming
with their ragged cloaks
only then
do they have the exalting sensation
of being unique, favored, irreplaceable
something that would never have happened
in those amorous practices
in which a man and a woman
cling to each other
to mutually reflect the void

These women escaped
what appearances
the street and customs
seek to point out
like village idiots

they cause the sumptuous beloved
invented and inventable
to whom I link my life
to endlessly emerge
on the screen of my heart

And I find that the end of this phrase
in which I confess eternal faithfulness
to the beloved
has a unique flavor
at the moment that I pronounce it

because I see from here
the worried expression of my peers
who would like to cast my effigy
in bronze
among the corpses
of their customary trivialities
among the familiar stereotypes
such as Don Juan and Casanova

disappointed by my devoted gazes
that caress a woman
with infinite love
that I will never have the impression
of knowing for too long

disconcerted by this romantic
innocent and childish repetition
of my satanic faithfulness

I am sure
that it would have been more reassuring
for the fine development
of human turpitude
if I had been a savage murderer
or an absurd arsonist
in this case I could have been reduced
to one of their predictable facts

but I will never be pardoned
for the quicksand of my agile gestures
frightening and dizzying like volcanoes
the shifting of the terrain
between one encounter and the next

this vibrant confusion
of fragmented women
barely known or totally unknown
that are attracted to me
with irresistible force
in circumstances
without any equivalent
in the preconceived world of common
or exceptional phenomena
but that sometimes recall
the process of displacement
and condensation
to which dream life is subject

a dress, a light veil
a green eye, a blue eye, a scent
or a slow poison, a fainting
a wound on the hip
of tousled hair
equally vague and distant allusions
equally favorable currents
that make this shadowy head bloom
on the surface of the water
the head of the beloved enshrouded in a nebula
the head of my adored beloved
tentacular, radiant, never born

and whose supreme affirmation
is the immense umbilical cord
through which I suck her heart

<em>Actually since Anti-Oedipus is a tediously written, post-structuralized, neo-marxist interpretation of a piece written by a Romanian surrealist in the mid-1940s called “The Inventor of Love”, I think it is much better to go back to the original (by Gherasim Luca). It is much better written, lacks the egregious neo-marxists concepts (like the “desiring machine”–a concept difficult to understand in Deleuze and Guattari, but quite clear in Negri who was a co-academic with Deleuze from about 1983 until the mid-1990s when he decided to go back to Italy, serve his brief prison-time and go out to formulate his utterly recuperative theory for social movements of the late 1990s-the present) and has concepts of interest (as well as aspects worthy of critique). But a number of folks in the reading group would probably find the fact that Luca wrote it as a long poem inexcusable. Luca and another Romanian surrealist, Trost (I forget his last name, actually seem to have been the first to come up with the idea of “anti-oedipus” (or at leat were the first to express it in writing). They were pretty clear (in a surrealist way), unlike Deleuze and Guattari.</em>